We are a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist, anglophile, traditionalist New England Yankee humans, humanoids, and animals with many interests beyond and above politics. Each of us has had a high-school education (or GED), but all had ADD so didn't pay attention very well, especially the dogs. Each one of us does "try my best to be just like I am," and none of us enjoys working for others, including for Maggie, from whom we receive neither a nickel nor a dime. Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.
In Willpower, the pioneering researcher Roy F. Baumeister collaborates with renowned New York Times science writer John Tierney to revolutionize our understanding of the most coveted human virtue: self-control.
In what became one of the most cited papers in social science literature, Baumeister discovered that willpower actually operates like a muscle: it can be strengthened with practice and fatigued by overuse. Willpower is fueled by glucose, and it can be bolstered simply by replenishing the brain's store of fuel. That's why eating and sleeping- and especially failing to do either of those-have such dramatic effects on self-control (and why dieters have such a hard time resisting temptation).
Baumeister's latest research shows that we typically spend four hours every day resisting temptation. No wonder people around the world rank a lack of self-control as their biggest weakness. Willpower looks to the lives of entrepreneurs, parents, entertainers, and artists-including David Blaine, Eric Clapton, and others-who have flourished by improving their self-control.
From Klavan's post:
Willpower surpasses even intelligence as a predictor of success in life. And Baumeister has performed a number of experiments that convinced him that willpower is something like a muscle: it can be strengthened, conserved, and fatigued...
But in the question period after the presentation, I asked Baumeister how else, aside from eating well, could willpower be strengthened. His response was this: Exercise strengthens willpower just as it strengthens muscles. Even a meaningless exercise of will — training yourself to use your left hand for a task instead of your right, for instance — can make the will stronger over time. He added — I quote from memory: “When I was a boy, I used to be baffled by the idea of profanity. I used to wonder why there should be all these words that everyone knew but nobody used. But now I understand: that strengthens willpower.”
Well, right. In other words, behaving well, behaving responsibly, learning the norms of politeness and refusing to abandon them without good reason tend to make you a more self-controlled, successful, and finally better person.
This is precisely the wisdom my generation threw away. Their promiscuity, adolescent foul-mouthedness, bad manners, and disregard for tradition — all of which they claimed were a new kind of freedom — were in fact the precursors to the very oldest kind of slavery: slavery to one’s own impulses and desires. This slavery, packaged in the Sixties as “identity” or “culture” or “the right to be yourself,” ultimately leads to enslavement by others as it makes you indolent and irresponsible and in need of protection and restraint by the powers that be. A poor black man’s journey from hip hop culture to prison is a perfect example. So is a middle class white man’s journey from moral license and unwarranted praise to his sniveling need for an all-providing — oh, and by the way, all-powerful — state.
Ditto to that, Mr. Klavan. I have always thought of willpower as mental or moral muscle. I've been practicing telling myself for years that I will do, or will not do, one thing or another several times daily. It gets easier, just like running that extra mile.
Willpower and persistence are surely important in pursuing one's goals in life, but I would add other items too, for examples:
Comportment Good vibes Sense of duty Social intuition Good, sane judgement Constructing good life plans - if you want to
On the collective scale, choice is nearly irrelevant. Only people with power have choices. The idea that the man waiting in the alley with a knife has a choice is a heresy because he is not a man with a knife, he is a collection of social statistics which assign him an automatic level of responsibility based on his race, gender, socioeconomic status and all the other variables. Whether or not he stabs someone with a knife, is not up to him, it's up to how society treats him.
Similarly financial troubles are not personal, they are social. Whether you can pay your bills has nothing to do with you, but with your race and class. If you succeed when the statistics say that you should fail, then you are an outlier. A rogue exception that only goes to prove the rule. Likewise if you fail when the statistics say that you should succeed. Individual actions can never disprove the collective snapshot of how society is.
If every person is wired into society like a giant bank of servers, then every individual malfunction is actually a social malfunction. If a man kills, then it's because his connection with society was bad. To understand why it was bad, the left examines the nature of the connection. If it was a privileged connection, then he was warped by his excessive access to the innate racism, sexism, classism and all the other bad "isms" of the society. If it was an underprivileged connection, then he was warped by his lack of access to the benefits that society had to offer him and being marginalized, he went off the reservation.
Blame-shifting is always fun, isn't it? Maggie's has been hot on this topic recently. "It's the hippies' fault." It's Bush's fault." It's my genes' fault." "It's my husband's fault." "It's society's fault." "It's my parents' fault." "It's my boss' fault."
But if things go well, it's to my credit, right?
While people make their decisions, plans, and choices for all sorts of reasons, it is a necessary premise in a free society that an individual is responsible for every one of his actions. In some cases, perhaps, a necessary fiction.
The bar mitzvah (a modern innovation, as I just learned) has it: "Today I am a man" and thus responsible for all of my actions.
The delicious pleasures of blame-shifting have never been permitted in the Bliss household.
...we know the brain can “change itself”. You could say that is one of its main jobs in fact – altering itself in response to experience to better adapt to the conditions in which it finds itself. For example, as children learn a language, their auditory system specialises to recognise the typical sounds of that language. Their brains become highly expert at distinguishing those sounds and, in the process, lose the ability to distinguish sounds they hear less often. (This is why many Japanese people cannot distinguish between the sounds of the letters “l” and “r”, for example, and why many Westerners have difficulty hearing the crucial tonal variations in languages like Cantonese). Learning motor skills similarly improves performance and induces structural changes in the relevant brain circuits. In fact, most circuits in the brain develop in an experience-dependent fashion, summed up by two adages: “cells that fire together, wire together” and “use it or lose it”.
Given the clear evidence for brain plasticity, the implication would seem to be that even if our brains come pre-wired with some particular tendencies, that experience, especially early experience, should be able to override them.
I would argue that the effect of experience-dependent development is typically exactly the opposite – that while the right kind of experience can, in principle, act to overcome innate tendencies, in practice, the effect is reversed. The reason is that our innate tendencies shape the experiences we have, leading us to select ones that tend instead to reinforce or even amplify these tendencies. Our environment does not just shape us – we shape it.
Indeed, smart people have been saying for many years that we have the power to shape our world, our realities, and our experience. There is a real reality out there somewhere, presumably, and real truth and Real Truth, but these things are elusive to our limited brains.
In daily life, we don't even consider that we live on a little rapidly-moving and spinning ball of rock in some sort of curved Space-Time in a frightening and awe-inspiring cosmos that few of us can comprehend. It's the stuff of college bull-sessions: Did the world make us, or do we make the world?
It's all good fun, but we do have to run our lives while we're here. Or not.
Only 17% of American physicians are members. I quit them long ago, over their politics. Like so many foundations and non-profits in America, they were hijacked by Lefties years ago.
The antipathy of physicians for the AMA is not just about money, turf, and guild. It goes way beyond that. However, apparently the AMA's strenuous support of Obamacare (seemingly without understanding any of its implications) has been the final straw.
There is a new breed of young physicians, especially women, who don't mind being employees, having bosses, or working as an agent of the government, but most docs over 40 are not interested in that. In general, docs like autonomy, flexibility, self-direction. Also, they hate paperwork and bureaucracy.
If I told patients that their records would be electronically accessible, I doubt anyone would speak openly with me. For that same reason, I keep very minimal paper records. My field of medicine is a little different, however.
It is? What kind of "love"? What did Lennon/McCarthy mean, and who made them experts?
Our link yesterday morning from F- Feelings was excellent: Love Slaves. "The bad news is that most love won’t work, and you’ve got to leave it alone when you know it won’t."
If we let emotion control our lives, we are animals. If we let reason control our lives, we are robots.
There are more kinds of love than the Eskimos have (proverbially) kinds of snow. I once tried to make a list, and gave up. People vary enormously in their needs or wants for all of those sorts of need, desire, addiction, and attachment.
That is excellent advice from someone over 30. Social isolation breeds all sorts of strange and unreasonable habits of mind, while social interaction helps us define ourselves, learn about ourselves, and, especially, to learn what our limits are. Isolation nurtures delusions of grandeur or delusions of inferiority, and prevents acceptance of reality.
I attended a faculty cocktail party last night, and, for some reason, the advice I had received many years ago came into my head as a shy person during boarding school: "When you enter a gathering, make sure you say hello to, or introduce yourself to, a dozen people. Then you can leave if you want to. Never act like a shmoozing politician, but it's your job to let people know that you exist. They might want to know you, or they might not. Either way, it's learning. Learning sometimes hurts."
At my age, with genteel breeding and with my life experience, it's a little silly for me to still need that reminder. People tend to enjoy and seek my company.
From a medical malpractice defense lawyer: "I can pick any one of your charts at random and, in a little while, find a potential malpractice case in there. Why? Because few things in medical care work out perfectly, and they can easily find another doc in your specialty from an Ivy medical school to say, at $1500/hour plus expenses, that he would have done it a little differently. My advice? Move to Texas where they will appreciate you docs. Texas wants happy, caring doctors who do not view every patient as a potential lawsuit."
To this day, there are baby boomers who half believe that “sexual intercourse began in nineteen sixty-three,” as Philip Larkin had it, “between the end of the Chatterley ban and the Beatles’ first LP.”
This, from Sleeper, seemed relevant to the article:
Trust is a fascinating topic mingling, as it does, personality tendencies (especially extent of projection of one's own evil impulses and thoughts) with cultural or subcultural norms and rational expectations. There are trust cultures and distrust cultures.
Life has slowly taught me to be less trusting than I am naturally inclined to be, given my cocooned upbringing. I am most trusting, rightly or wrongly, of my own sort of people amongst whom, on the whole, there are strict and agreed-upon codes of behavior.
One aspect of being "socialized" humans is the capacity to appraise the people we have any meaningful contact with. Most people get better at this, over time. Older is wiser, usually. We get too soon old, and too late smart.
These appraisals happen automatically. We know that most human "thought" takes place as non-deliberately as our digestion. We call that intuition: "I like the cut of his jib;" "She seems like a superficial ninny;" "There's something off about them but I can't put my finger on it;" "He's crazy;" "She strikes me as a strong, upright person;" "He feels calculating and devious;" "She seems full of fun, sexiness, and vitality;" "A schmoozer-saleman-type who, if you offer them your hand, takes you by the arm;""The guy seems very shrewd and clever;" "He's a gloomy Gus;" "Too needy;" "What a phony;" "She's a flake, but a good kind of flake;" "He's an Old Soul;" "He's got a personal agenda;" "This kid will go far."
We get a quick "feel" for people. Vibes. Our brains have a remarkable ability to form automatic and almost instant impressions of a person, accurately or not, from an abundance of information: social presentation, tone of voice, body language, posture, facial expressions, dress and grooming, use of words, style of interacting, and social signaling of all sorts. It takes around a fifth of a second, after all, to fall in love or in lust, and not much longer to think that you might, or might not, want to consider getting to know somebody. Of course, it pays to be careful, but most people mean well unless they are on the make in some calculating way, and everybody wants some things - but perhaps not from you.
When we have any interest and curiosity in a person beyond the superficial (driven by such things as business dealings, attraction, things in common, etc), we have to move past the intuitive impressions, which are often in error and contaminated by emotional and/or transference reactions, put our thinking cap on, and do a little active thinking about a person. People don't do it in the methodical way that shrinks do as trained observers and inquirers, but cover many of the same bases of human interaction. For some examples:
- intelligence, curiosity, fund and depth of knowledge, abilities, talents, wit, good cheer, interests, goals and dreams - do we get along - are we on the same page with shared assumptions and understandings? Same tribe? Do we speak the same language, so to speak? Or are we different in interesting ways? - quirks, eccentricities, weaknesses, criminality, and obvious flaws - respectfulness, decorum, and self-respect - sociability, manners, openness, depth, relatedness or self-centeredness, self-awareness - integrity, honor, self-control, level of BS, reliability, trustworthiness. Are they givers, takers, or neither; general emotional maturity and judgement - level of energy, vitality, and ambition: Are they fun or stimulating to be with? As Imus would say, "What do they bring to the table?" - level of life functioning (that covers a whole lot of territory)
along with other considerations, and, of course:
- Do they want something from me and, if so, what? (eg sex, money, love, favors, attention, status, casual social acquaintanceship, friendship, close friendship, Christian fellowship, help, companionship, collegiality, conversational amusement, or, as in most cases, little or nothing at all, etc.). If we're in an introspective mood, we might also ask ourselves what we want with them, and where we want to locate our boundaries with them.
Shrinks, when at work, attempt character assessment in a way that is analogous to a physical exam (ie "Come into the consulting room and take your social facade off. Strip to your psychological underwear. The doctor will be with you shortly, and you can let her know who you really are, what you are really made of, and what your private struggles are.). I am not impressed that, in the end, we shrinks make many fewer initial errors than the average thoughtful and perceptive person on the street. We just don't use the same lingo.
I began this post with the intention of writing about different levels of life functioning, with this as an intro, but this is already long enough for now. LOF can wait until later.
It's a subject that has been on my mind for quite a while - the phenomenon of perpetual psychological adolescence in us decadent and pampered Americans - so I will look forward to seeing what she has to say about it.
I hope she will mention that the post-war worship of youth, which culminated in the late 60s and 70s, provided social permission, if not incentive, for adults to continue behaving like kids. Even college, once the domain of the serious, has become an extension of high-school. Given the human temptation for regression, and the joys of youth when compared with the rigors, duties, sacrifices, and responsibilities of adulthood, it's no wonder that people welcome the socio-cultural invitation. Every psychiatrist and psychoanalyst in America, and probably in Europe, is well-aware of this. And so are our politicians, who feed into it - and feed on it: Take care of me, Mommy and Daddy Government.
Photo: These mill workers in Georgia around the turn of the century were probably more mature than some of the 40 year-olds I see these days. Yes, I am in favor of children working. All of mine did. I did, too - and it was not "fun." However, I had time to work on my tennis too.
Psychoanalytic theorists have been struggling with trauma theory since Freud first abandoned it when he realized that fantasy can have as large an impact on a person as can real things. He more or less discovered the realm of what we shrinks call "psychic reality."
My take on it all is that dramatic events of all sorts affect people, but that the impact depends on their pre-existing character structure. One person's horror can be another person's excitement.
I have never been able to understand most of that "self-psychology" stuff he talks about, but I do know that everybody is born defective in some ways, and that emotionally-traumatic events or circumstances, generally unavoidable if you live long enough, change people in all sorts of ways. Sometimes they are opportunities for growth and maturation, sometimes they are simply destructive. Often, the destruction leaves a permanent scar, if not an open wound.
We all want to thrive and flourish in life, as best we can. Why not? Life is short. A quote from the Amazon review:
"Positivity is literally the feel-good book of the year, providing a scientifically sound prescription for joy, health, and creativity. Read one to two chapters daily as needed or until grumpiness subsides." —Daniel Gilbert, professor of psychology, Harvard University, and author of Stumbling on Happiness
I have grown fond of Psychiatrist-blogger 1 Boring Old Man. I generally agree with him on things, and I respect his efforts to be more up to date on the latest things than I am. From one of his Awakening Thoughts:
My real complaint about modern psychiatry, besides the corrupting influence of industries of various flavors, is that it lacks the tension and curiosity about things unknown that drives medicine forward. For all the talk of neuroscience, what I mostly see in our literature is "product testing" and the application of any new technology of science that comes along to conditions without creative ideas and hypotheses driving the endeavor. I don’t know why people have Schizophrenia, and I want to know about that. There are thousands of similar questions, and not all of them have to do with neuroscience. I’m sure that people get depressed, have bad anxiety, or behave destructively because of things in their minds, or biographies, or lives – not in their brains. That seems self-evident to me. And I’m tired of having those of us who are interested in that causality discounted as kooks based on complaints about the early theories of Freud or the arrogance of our predecessors.
My profession is currently schizophrenic (in the non-clinical sense).
A commenter here mentioned C.S. Lewis' The Abolition of Man recently. It got me thinking about what the most influential books have been for my adult thinking about socio-religio-political topics.
I'm sure I omitted quite a few, but these came to mind. (I guess, as an ole Yankee, I am rather freedom-oriented and leave-me-alone-oriented rather than gimme-oriented. I was raised to fend for myself and to shoot my own moose, but that might be old-fashioned nowadays. The "modern" women, apparently, want government to be their help and support in life instead of husbands. That's pathetic - on both sides.)
When I think about writings that influence me, I wonder whether they indeed influence, or whether they articulate half-thought and semi-formed thoughts that were already brewing in the back of my brain from my life experience.
In an ironic conclusion, Lewis predicts that what will be hailed an man's ultimate victory over Nature (such as human cloning?) will actually be Nature's ultimate victory over man. This will occur when we can fully control the kind of people the next generation will be (i.e., how they think), but in the absence of moral standards, this choice will be made arbitrarily; that is, according to purely Natural impulses - thus we have the Abolition of Man as man and the ascendancy of man as animal.
Feel welcome to add your personal list to the comments.
Why aren't guys growing up these days? Or did guys ever really want go grow up? I don't know. A sociologist named Michael Kimmel has a book out reporting on his new study. For example, meet Jason:
Jason graduated from Dartmouth almost five years ago. Now 26, he works in finance in Boston and shares a Back Bay apartment with five other guys with whom he went to school. He runs and works out, stays fit, and dates lots of different women all in their early twenties. At night, he hangs out at the Dartmouth bars of Boston. Hey, college was supposed to be the best years of your life, right? he explains, with only a trace of defensiveness in his voice. So where is it written that it has to end when you graduate? College is forever, man. That's what the admissions guys say that these will be your friends forever. Well, forever is now.
Actual writings from hospital patient charts (medical transcription people are not perfect, nor is docs' handwriting):
1. The patient refused autopsy. 2. The patient has no previous history of suicides. 3. Patient has left white blood cells at another hospital. 4. She has no rigors or shaking chills, but her husband states she was very hot in bed last night. 5. Patient has chest pain if she lies on her left side for over a year. 6. On the second day the knee was better, and on the third day it disappeared. 7. The patient is tearful and crying constantly. She also appears to be depressed. 8. The patient has been depressed since she began seeing me in 1993. 9. Discharge status: Alive but without permission. 10. Healthy appearing decrepit 69-year old male, mentally alert but forgetful. 11. Patient had waffles for breakfast and anorexia for lunch. 12. She is numb from her toes down. 13. While in ER, she was examined, x-rated and sent home. 14. The skin was moist and dry. 15. Occasional, constant infrequent headaches. 16. Patient was alert and unresponsive. 17. Rectal examination revealed a normal size thyroid. 18. She stated that she had been constipated for most of her life, until she got a divorce. 19. I saw your patient today, who is still under our car for physical therapy. 20. Both breasts are equal and reactive to light and accommodation. 21. Examination of genitalia reveals that he is circus sized. 22. The lab test indicated abnormal lover function. 23. Skin: somewhat pale but present. 24. The pelvic exam will be done later on the floor. 25. Patient has two teenage children, but no other abnormalities.
In 2005, Aron teamed up with some neurologists and with Helen Fisher, the biologicalanthropologist who devised the questionnaire used to match people on Chemistry.com, a division of Match.com, to conduct a series of experiments. The first experiment placed happily-inlove people in an fMRI scanner to take photos of their brains. They found neural activation in areas of the brain linked with reward, excitement, and euphoria. Aron says this is likely indicative of early-stage love. Over time, the activation in this reward area can diminish. The car runs out of gas.
The processes that keep people together take place elsewhere in the brain. It’s a trait we share with only a few other animals, like the prairie vole.
and
We think of heartbreak as metaphoric, but the body actually does respond to emotional trauma, releasing a flood of stress chemicals like adrenaline that, in some cases, can overwhelm even an otherwise healthy person and cause his or her heart to spasm. Broken heart syndrome, as it’s colloquially known, has been tracked at the nation’s leading heart clinics since 2005, but because its symptoms look so similar to those of a heart attack, it is often misdiagnosed, says Ilan Wittstein, an assistant professor of medicine at the Johns Hopkins Heart Institute and the lead author of a New England Journal of Medicine article first describing the syndrome.
The movement to gradually destigmatize all social deviancies continues apace. For better or worse, we've come a long way from The Scarlet Letter.
I myself am a clinger. I cling to my antique cultural traditions, morals, codes, and religion as my life's foundations, and I lack the wisdom to opine about whether the destigmatizing of adultery, abortion, pornography, promiscuity, divorce (can anybody remember when divorce was socially shameful?), homosexuality, gay marriage, gay child-rearing, LGBTQ and whatever, prostitution, fetishes, many crimes, drug abuse, overtly antisocial behaviors (see all of the defenses of the UK's rioters), single motherhood, etc. is for the best or not. It certainly does represent a socio-cultural shift which some consider decadent. The notion of destigmatizing crime, for sure, seems like a big problem to me but there are significant subcultures even in the US who do.
The social acceptance of many of these behaviors seems to me to be part of the "therapeutic culture" which I, as an MD and practicing psychotherapist, find to be close to insane in its assumption that all would be perfect humans if not for inner conflict or external traumata. Sen. Daniel Moynihan, who I had the pleasure of talking to several times, defined many such things as "definining deviancy down."
Already, Moslem polygamy is sort-of overlooked in Western nations, and I see no fairness in not overlooking it in traditionalist Mormon families - or in anybody else who wants to do it. That's my Libertarian side speaking rather than my more personal, moralistic and Christian side.
Currently, the American Psychiatric Association has, under consideration, a proposal to de-pathologize Pedophilia. Why anybody in the general public cares very much about the opinion of this APA committee is beyond me, but many do. I doubt that they will have the political cojones to actually do that but, to get a little multicultural here, we have to bear in mind that pedophilia has been and continues to be culturally accepted in many cultures and subcultures - most famously, historically, amongst European royalty, the Greeks and Romans, the Moslems, and Africans, and currently amongst some Asian cultures and many Moslem ones. Prepubescent girls are for rent everywhere in south Asia. As a commonly-defined crime, pedophilia is found everywhere in the world.
Bonobo monkeys do it all, so it must be OK. Human fantasy and psychic reality may not be too different from Bonobo behavior.
In my opinion, pedophilia is not so much of a disease in itself as it is a crime - in our culture. It is a very good idea not to commit crimes even though supposedly everybody does, wittingly or unwittingly. In my field of Psychoanalysis, we still define culturally-deviant sexual behaviors as polymorphous-perverse or plain perverse, but even we - the supposed truth-tellers about the human heart - are subject to taboo PC pressures. It is interesting to see how taboos change, but never go away: now it seems that PC defines the taboos.
I remember a gay patient, years ago, who reported to me with some alarm that he had been dancing with a lady at a wedding and found himself feeling aroused and attracted to her. I joked with him that now he was revealing himself, in modern cultural terms, to have a real perversion.
Some people become concerned with who and what they are, and some people just forge onward and never think twice about it.
To keep it simple, I'll tell you how to "find yourself." Engage the world in all the ways you can: socially, spiritually, economically, morally, avocationally in sports, volunteer activities, clubs, going places and doing things, and in hobbies.
By doing those things, the world will tell you what and who you are. Engaging reality is the best teacher. My experience teaches me that people avoid some engagments with the world because they do not want to learn what reality has to teach them about who and what they are.
Generally speaking, Prof. Reality teaches humility as its first lesson, and goes on from there.
...why do women work fewer hours, choose less demanding jobs, and then earn less than men do? The answer is obvious: kids. A number of researchers have found that if you consider only childless women, the wage gap disappears. June O’Neill, an economist who has probably studied wage gaps as much as anyone alive, has found that single, childless women make about 8 percent more than single, childless men do (though the advantage vanishes when you factor in education). Using Census Bureau data of pay levels in 147 of the nation’s 150 largest cities, the research firm Reach Advisors recently showed that single, childless working women under 30 earned 8 percent more than their male counterparts did.
This did apply to me:
It makes no sense to think of either the mommy track or the resulting wage differential as an injustice to women. Less time at work, whether in the form of part-time jobs or fewer full-time hours, is what many women want and what those who can afford it tend to choose. Feminists can object till the Singularity arrives that women are “socialized” to think that they have to be the primary parent. But after decades of feminism and Nordic engineering, the continuing female tropism toward shorter work hours suggests that that view is either false or irrelevant. Even the determined Swedes haven’t been able to get women to stick around the office.
It's a subject that has been on my mind for quite a while - the phenomenon of perpetual psychological adolescence in us decadent and pampered Americans - so I will look forward to seeing what she has to say about it.
My list would have to include:
Why aren't guys growing up these days? Or did guys ever really want go grow up? I don't know. A sociologist named Michael Kimmel has a book out reporting on his new study. For example, meet Jason:
We all have them, and have had them.